A Prayer from a Guyanese Creole
Percy C. Hintzen is a native of Guyana. He is Professor Emeritus at the University of California Berkeley and, most recently, was Professor of Global and Sociocultural Studies in the School of International and Public Affairs at Florida International University.
The trauma of racial and political violence in the nineteen sixties is a pervasive feature etched into every aspect of the Guyanese consciousness. Everything, it seems, is lived, understood and interpreted through the prism of this story. Race is the mobilizing sentiment around which the period is commemorated and relived. People’s National Congress (PNC) and People’s Progressive Party (PPP) are its synonyms.
Race politics was the weapon used by Britain and the United States to destroy anti-colonial working-class solidarity and the threat it posed to capitalism. It was a product of the colonial machinations of the early 1950s, when Guyana made its transformation into self-government. The fear was that a self-governing and independent country would join a global socialist movement that had fused anti-colonial nationalism with Western European radicalism. The result was a split of the nationalist movement into the two racialized factions of the PPP and the PNC that have dominated the country’s politics ever since. A crescendo of political violence in the sixties cemented race forever in the county’s popular consciousness. Any debate about policy and politics rekindles the racial trauma of the period, even in the face of fundamental and dramatic changes in the global order. Every contentious issue in the country is interpreted, understood and acted upon with reference to the period and “Burnham” and “Jagan”, the founding leaders of the two racialized factions. In its wake, racial violence has become a permanent feature of every election campaign for national office. The sole objective of popular party-political support is to keep the other racial group out of power. Without the illusion of race, the legitimacy of either of the two dominant parties to govern would disappear. Both depend on international intervention to gain and maintain control of governance. This is the way in which they and we are “in control”.
Guyanese identity is forged from hybridized Creole historical encounters. These are formed in the intermingling of the cultures of the marginalized and displaced indigenous first people with others from everywhere including South Asia, Africa, East Asia, Western Europe, Southern Europe, the Middle East, etc. of an exclusive “racial identity” created by supporters of the two main parties. I focus on both because they constitute the fundamental division that follows our consciousness. The question I would like to ask Guyanese who identify with one or the other of these imaginary groups is “What makes you African?” and “What makes you Indian?” Like it or not, you are “cosmopolitan”. The different cultural origins from which your identities are forged have been conceived to produce different and more meaningful ways of being “Guyanese”. These differences have little to do with “race” and more to do with the socio-economic statuses that Guyanese occupy as peasants, agro-proletarians, subsistence farmers, traditional producers, or members of urbanized and semi-urbanized groups. These differences are reflected in the nature and composition of local communities. For example, the neighborhoods and residential neighborhoods in the Georgetown of my youth replicated hierarchies of color and class where significant differences in Guyanese lives are and continue to be forged. These differences are also formed by the urban/rural divide that has always marked me as a “city”.
The illusion of race justified the colonial and postcolonial intervention necessary to sustain the critical role played by Guyana in the accumulation of global capital. It has prevented the development of a nationalist consensus in the face of Western retaliation whenever the people of the country have chosen an alternative path. Western punitive intervention against a radical PPP in the fifties and sixties has become widespread and permanent. In the 1970s, it destroyed the economy, turning the country into the second poorest country in the Western Hemisphere. Led by the United States and Canada, it was directed against economic transformation efforts by the PNC regime that were inspired by the African socialism of Tanzania and Ghana. These began with the nationalization of foreign-owned corporations, a decision motivated by the anti-imperialist mobilization of the party’s base of support. The regime turned on the defensive in an alliance with Cuba and the Soviet Union to mitigate its effects. It then continued to implement the policies of self-sufficient domestic production and cooperative socialism. But the success of these policies was precluded from the beginning by the politics of race. The ruling party chose to cling to power rather than accept calls to bridge the racial divide made by a Patriotic Coalition for Democracy, which was calling for a transition to a government of national unity and consensus. That coalition enjoyed the support of the majority of the country’s population. At that time, the ruling PNC regime, based on an informal poll, enjoyed the support of only twelve percent of the population. In the absence of national consensus, the PNC was forced into an “accommodation” with a newly emerging neoliberal form of Western capitalism to ensure its survival. In 1992, it was replaced by the PPP, whose “racial” supporters, who constituted a voting majority, guaranteed victory in “fair and free” elections, which signaled a showdown from the international guarantors of power, who first and were actively engaged in keeping the party out of power due to its commitment to “Marxist-Leninism”. To ensure its victory, party leaders secured and even extended the neoliberal “accommodation” made by the PNC, renouncing any challenge to US-centered global capitalism and US imperialism. Both were central elements in the ideology and politics that motivated the formation of the PPP in the nineteen forties. The about-face ensured the protection of the party’s victory against violent racial retaliation by supporters of the ousted PNC. The intervention of Western governments and their regional surrogates, justified on the basis of the protection of democracy, guaranteed and ensured PPP control of the governing apparatus.
Neoliberal accommodation signed the exercise of power by a ruling group in the exclusive service and protection of the interests of an alliance of local capital overwhelmingly dominated by Indian Asian businesses, a creole elite that shares control of national governance, experts and professionals in the public and private. sectors and global capitalists represented in the bilateral presence of powerful Western governments and multilateral agencies of international financial institutions, especially the IMF, the World Bank, the WTO, the US Treasury and the US Department of Commerce. The irony of the racial disorder that serves its various interests is that most of those who identify as either “Indian” supporters of the PPP or “African” supporters of the PNC suffer its consequences equally. They have been forced to resort to mass migration to escape the devastation it has caused to the economy and society.
I believe that an alternative to party-political rule is essential to any successful effort at meaningful transformation organized around justice, happiness, well-being, sustainability, self-determination and human security. This effort has been repeatedly thwarted by racial sentiments, hatred and animosity that has transcended the arena of politics to plague popular self-awareness in the country. The sixties crisis in Guyana was occurring at a time when global movements were exposing the entanglement of race, capitalism and imperialism. This was fueling anti-imperialist opposition to the Vietnam War, anti-colonialism in the colonies, and a rejection of race by a “Black Power Movement” that included all members of the global majority whose origins lay outside of Europe.
These movements joined the global spread of anti-capitalist mobilization of workers, intellectuals and students centered in Western Europe. They materialized in the West Indies in the wake of support for students at Sir George Williams University in Canada who had organized around the transformative agenda of “Black Power”. West Indians were at the center of the protests that followed. Among them was Joey Jagan, the South Asian son of Cheddi Jagan and his European-American Jewish wife, Janet Jagan, both leaders and founding members of the PPP. The expulsion of West Indian students from Canada sparked a 1970 “black power rebellion” against the ruling People’s National Movement (PNM) in Trinidad. It represented a rejection of the ruling PNM’s use of race as a cover for supporting national and international capitalist interests.
The rebellion was organized by an alliance of students at the University of the West Indies, trade unions and progressive radicals. The rank and file of the predominantly black Trinidad and Tobago Regiment and some members of its officer corps joined the mutiny. “Black Power” was correctly understood by them as a generalized challenge to all forms of white supremacy, which they understood to be at the root of capitalism and global imperialism. Workers and protesters were not fooled by the party’s claims to legitimacy rooted in its racial appeal. Every attempt at post-colonial anti-government rebellion in Trinidad has its origins in the black working class against the so-called “black” governments. This is inconceivable in Guyana where political violence is organized around the manipulation of racial power. The rule of the sugar, bauxite, gold and timber barons is now being replaced by that of the new oil barons. Exxon, which was headed for bankruptcy before the Guyana oil discovery, has now posted the biggest profits in the company’s history. Escape from their sovereign power and the crises it causes can only happen when the majority, overwhelmingly located within the lower layers of the color/class hierarchy, participate directly and make meaningful decisions in the governance of their lives.
When people ask me what I am, I answer that I am a Guyanese Creole. This is how my identity was forged and where my interactions have been and continue to be most intense. Guyanese identity, like mine, is the product of relationships between persons whose origins lie in the many places from which their ancestors were uprooted, dispossessed, and recruited into the project of colonization. It is formed by polyglots and multitudes of cultures, beliefs and values that have been conceived in a Creole reality. The consumption of roti and curry, channa, pepper pot, fried rice, chow mein, metagee, cook up, garlic pork, black pudding (a particularly British dish originating from Homeric Greece), etc., is not limited to in those of origin. in the countries where these foods originate. Their dishes have lost all claims to ethno-cultural authenticity, transforming into the uniqueness of Guyanese flavors. These are the Guyanese – Creole cosmopolitans. I am inviting those concerned with the myth of race to take the time to watch, discuss, and engage with a documentary entitled “Race, the Power of an Illusion.” Then you can probably come to the following conclusion: Africa is a diverse continent. India is a diverse sub-continent. African is not a race. Not even Indian. And, we hope that your commitment can inspire salvation for our unique and beautiful Guyana, once identified as the most hospitable country in the world with the best prospects for sustainable development. The URL is given below. https://www.bing.com/videos/search?q=race+the+power+of+an+illusion&docid=608003555320205207&mid=7A568E34B1993C30D42F7A568E34B1992FM30D&tail.
